Don't think so. Pretty sure it's 1080 interlaced (I'll check tonight). Their new Sky Q system offers 4K, and they already have a decent selection of 4K content (both live and recorded).

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I'm not expecting them to make 4K mainstream in the next 5 years.

Sky are doing a big push to ditch satellite tech and switch to broadband for delivering TV. With all new material being shot and made available in 4K, I think it is going to come a lot sooner than that.

BT bought their own spectrum in the 4G auction which hasn't been announced as being used. I originally assumed that BT was aiming it at enterprise usage, but it has been suspiciously quiet. I wonder how much of EE's transceiver hardware is sufficiently multi-protocol-flexible so as to use it on existing sites.

Given that Ofcom/Three are trying to prevent EE from bidding on 5G spectrum because of BT's existing spectrum ownership, you'd think that BT would be under some pressure to make use of that 4G block, or get rid of it. If BT start to use it for fixed-line replacement and USO purposes, there would be an argument to exclude it from calculations in the mobile-only world.

LTE in my view is quite comparable to fixed line broadband in most internet applications, clearly good enough for VOIP given voLTE technology, might be not good enough for twitch shooters yet tho, but I think for most other types of usage its good enough. It is also reliable, note when I had my cabinet issues I was running 24/7 with my phone connected to my pfsense unit as the internet provider.

3G always felt like a heavily interleaved line where there lag for websites to start loading and SSH was pretty laggy to use, but with LTE both those issues are vastly improved.

The 2 showstoppers for LTE is coverage in villages (which I agree is a joke but easily solved by a USO if gov has the balls to introduce it) and the usage limitations which is solved by investment from the providers (extra masts and backhauls to those masts). BT may have decided its cheaper to mass deploy LTE than to rollout extra fibre in the local loop.

Sky is indeed 1080i and has been for many yearsFreeview HD is the only OTA broadcast in the UK that is 1080P. Even that is only 1080P25 and not full 1080P50

It's just an encoder setting, and all films are progressive and a lot of dramas are regardless on the platform used to receive them. As has been the case for decades really, progressive footage gets sent to us in an interlaced container, this is called Progressive segmented frame, and the display device simply gives us back the original progressive footage. You are still watching progressive footage on Sky if it's a film or drama shot that way.

The issue though is progressive footage doesn't compress as well when treated by the encoder like it is interlaced, it is better for the encoder to switch to progressive encoding for progressive footage. The BBC realised this and to save more data, their encoders now analyse the footage and switch on the fly between 1080i and 1080p compression modes. This can happen on a scene by scene basis, even interlaced footage can be encoded as 1080p if it's a static image or has very little movement. This is what caused a lot problems originally when they introduced this as some decoders used in PVRs and TVs were not happy constantly switching between the two modes. Really it was never intended for an encoder to switch constantly between the two, but only at the boundary of programs, and in the same way we can sometimes here a glitch when a drama starts that is in 5.1 and it switches to that, so some decoders constantly glitched as the stream kept switching from interlaced to progressive and back again. These issues have been sorted out now.